‘I honestly don’t know if you can help me,’ I wrote recently to a very lovely and well-meaning business coach, who had contacted me about joining her programme. I then proceeded to type out a cascade of worries about the state of my business in this climate.
Her answer was that a lot of what I was saying sounded like a mindset problem. And in many ways, she is right. The way we look at things, the way we choose to interpret how external information affects our lives is always through the filter of our own mindset. Our thoughts control our emotions, and we can think different thoughts if we want to feel certain things etc. etc.
But I also want to push back a bit – I feel like this very popular and current wave of mindset advice: 1 – doesn’t address the underlying very real HUGE problems that we are all facing and 2 – puts all the onus on us as individuals to ‘be happy’ or ‘confident’ or ‘show up’ and that if we only did that more expertly, things would be fine, or at least better.
But as I watch small business after small business close up shop, I’m pretty sure we can’t all mindset our way out of the situation. It's basic maths: costs are skyrocketing and people have less money.
I’m not at the crying on camera stage yet, but I have started to think seriously about finding a real job (as if that’s any easier). I started Wear & Resist just after Brexit and the Orange Abomination, because I felt like I had to DO something, I wasn’t even sure what exactly, but I wanted to wear jewellery that spoke for me and I thought others would too, and I wanted to support women’s charities. There was a sense then that things had taken a wrong turn, but that if, together, we mobilised and channelled our rage, we might be able to steer ourselves right again.
But that hasn’t happened. Too many have obeyed in advance. Google Maps only took a few hours to change the name of Lake Ontario. The movement would need to be on the scale of the Arab Spring, the Bangladeshi student protests, or how the Albanians recently did it, and it just isn’t happening. In the US they can shoot innocent women in the face and still life goes on pretty much as normal. We (and I am including myself in this) are still too peace-loving and passive to sacrifice our own lives and livelihoods for the change that's required, and the billionaires in charge know that, and they control the media which controls what we are aware of.
I feel like I'm going slowly mad trying to figure out what on earth we can actually do. I keep making lists to try to, at least, get to grips with the worries consuming me, but the problem is the lists are always too long, and how do you put these things in any order? I guess global warming past the point of no return needs to come first and then there's the continuing genocide … but where does our own Gisele Pelicot case in Manchester which has been barely mentioned in our non-existent press go in comparison to a Federal Judge in the US ruling AI-generated child porn is legal? Or the fact that masked blackshirts are allowed to march unheeded and shut down Dover, while they have arrested and raided the house of an 84 year old woman who was peacefully protesting? What will happen, I wonder, to those Reform pensioners that kicked and beat the crap out of a woman for heckling?
It's like the beginning of a disaster movie, with so many signs that we are speeding into societal and environmental collapse, and yet life continues on. I feel pangs of envy when customers order Hope necklaces, as I'm barely hanging onto the hope that fuelled me to start all of this.
I found myself blurting all this out at a recent women’s group in Oxford. A lovely customer invited me (Thanks Judith!) thinking it might be just what I needed – and it was: a safe space where women of all ages (including members of the punk band the Hormones) talk and support each other. After my first visit they asked if I would speak about Wear & Resist and I realised, while I was preparing what to say, that I’ve been doing this now for nearly a decade.
As I passed around various examples of past designs to the group, I felt such a mixture of emotions. Designs that I should feel proud of, the Vote necklaces that had sold so well and adorned so many women who were then elected, and then the MP brooches designed with Helen Pankhurst, that I made for circa 80 women MPs with their individual numbers, I now want to distance myself from. They seemed like they came from another time, a time when I truly believed that getting the Conservatives out would bring a change to the awful austerity, and that this new government with so many women elected would fight the privitisation of the NHS. That they would at least look at taxing extreme wealth and focus on proper funding for education and the arts. I hoped they might reinstate our rights to protest and realign the leadership of BBC News which has skewed so far to the right. I even hoped they would reconsider rejoining the EU, as it would be a clear way to improve our economy and help businesses. I was so excited and honoured to go to the House of Commons. It felt like a real change was coming.
But it didn’t. Austerity continues, our NHS data was sold to Palantir (and we can’t opt out), you can’t protest a genocide without being arrested, talking points on the BBC continue to centre on small boats and promote Reform, while big business and billionaires remain untaxed and in control.
I hadn’t realised how ranty and disillusioned I had become until that evening at the Women's Group, but I was in a safe space. We debated and talked for a long time about the many different ways of resisting. Some were very kind, and assured me that by empowering women who wear the jewellery I am helping in a small way. Many said their way of coping is to ignore the news, so that they can preserve their energy for supporting their own communities. Resisting can take many forms.
But still, I have felt stuck trying to decide what action I should actually take that will be meaningful, and how on earth I can take steps to help my struggling business. It makes me sick that capitalism influences my choices about what I say and don't say, about how 'I show up'. I struggle to post online because I want to be real, but being real is bad for sales. What I would really love to do is go off social media completely as the tech bros behind it are the instigators of so much that is wrong, I hate what phones are doing to us, and it would help me immensely to not be aware of each awful thing that is happening, but it's the only way I can reach new and old customers, and anyway, my business is called Wear & Resist, so I can't really just hide my head in the sand.
It's an emotional rollercoaster even on good years running a small business, because sales vary so much from week to week, but until this year, sales have always been an improvement on the year before. So although it is still a micro-business, it has felt like W&R was on an upward trajectory. But this is true for everyone this year, and I also believe this constant talk of 'growth' is clearly unsustainable and wrecking our planet. As Edward Abbey said, “growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” I don't want W&R to get huge, to become a manager rather than a maker, and I'm so glad I didn't invest in hiring people as I would have been in trouble. I know I'm very lucky that I don't have staff to pay or rent on a workshop, and that I can ride out quieter times.
I am also, of course, incredibly grateful that I've been able to do creative work and a job I love for so long. It's amazing being able to share my designs and the connections I make through them and hearing how much they mean to customers. And going back to the beginning: mindset is of course important too. I am aware that it can all easily become a negative spiral, if we focus on all the problems then don't do the work, and I keep telling myself that it's enough just to keep going and trying my best not to overthink it all.
One way I have been self-soothing is by carving wax rings. Earlier this year I took a wax-carving jewellery class with the incredible Erica Sharp and then signed up for weekly silversmithing courses with her. I love medieval jewellery – (and paintings and manuscripts) and ever since I can remember I’ve dreamt of making rings with words around them – beautiful precious objects, (portable property!) that say something and mean something. Yes I make a lot of sweary jewellery that plays an important role in me being of service to my community :-), but I also love making quieter designs that bring strength and encouragement, and would love to branch into rings that do just this. It’s quite a big pivot and investment, and there are technical issues like ring sizes, and in some ways I think I've been a little scared to do the thing I most want to do. I just have to get up the nerve to make this move, or at least do it in addition to the core acrylic designs. Perhaps in a way, this period of quieter sales is a blessing in disguise and it will give me the opportunity to focus on getting these made and up on the website.
This is the wax ring I'm about to get cast with the words 'All shall be well and' – a wordy infinity ring ... and the silver one is the very first ring I carved for myself (while I was learning how to carve) with the words 'Noli Timere' - don't be afraid. These were the last words the poet Seamus Heaney said to his wife before he died. I wrote my Master's Thesis on his book Station Island, and thought I'd end with this quote, words I always come back to when I feel a bit lost, from his commencement speech at The University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, (my home town, although I wasn't there!)
Getting started, keeping going, getting started again — in art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm not only of achievement but of survival, the ground of convinced action, the basis of self-esteem and the guarantee of credibility in your lives, credibility to yourselves as well as to others.
Sarah xx
